Comment posts!

http://garrettstheater.blogspot.com/2013/05/3-viewings.html?showComment=1367625791971#c8014824137652318360

http://gracietheatre2130.blogspot.com/2013/04/on-verge.html?showComment=1367626767727#c1433907184602066609

http://ohyeahdramaa.blogspot.com/2013/05/show-and-tell-post-3.html?showComment=1367629170471#c2505450408363922156

http://austinthtr2130.blogspot.com/2013/04/prompt-eleven-fires-in-mirror.html?showComment=1367630534522#c2126511546454036616

http://dorapereli2130.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-drowsy-chaperone-response.html?showComment=1367633500032#c1224165012432919536

Show and Tell 3 Post: Play

My third and final 'Show and Tell' post I chose Samuel Beckett's Play, a one-act play. This play was written around 1963 and was originally written in German. Spiel, as it is called, premiered at the Ulmer Theatre in Ulm-Donau, Germany on June 14^th of that year. Deryk Mendel was the director with Gerhard Winter, Nancy Illig, and Sigfried Pfeiffer playing the only three characters. It was finally produced in London, in English, ten months later at the Old Vic theatre. This play was featured in the Beckett on Film project in 2000 with Kristin Scott Thomas, Juliet Stevenson, and Alan Rickman.

 

Play is about a love triangle told in short spurts, told in the past tense and not in the order it actually transpired. It starts with a man, M, who tires of his wife, W2, takes up a mistress, W2. When W1 finds out about the mistress, she becomes unstable. She hires a private detective, she threatens to kill herself, and she even confronts W2, and continues this until M appears to have left W2. W1 is placated until M starts seeing W2 again, this time leaving with her, abandoning his wife. But soon that relationship turns sour, and the W2 receives the same treatment as W1 when M leaves her for another.

 

Like all of Beckett plays, this is no ordinary straight play, and that the playwright’s notes and how he wants the play presented is as much of the script as the words are. Instead of creating a play with dialogue, and have it performed as it happens, Beckett chose to have the three characters to be shown only by their faces while their bodies are hidden in funeral urns. The three people show no sign of acknowledgement of each other and when one speaks, a spotlight is on them while the other two are silent. Far be it from me to try and read Beckett’s mind, but this gives me an image of dead souls reflecting the same moment of their lives, only from their point of view. Like ghosts who do not pass over because of unfinished business, these souls are locked in these urns as if their anger or guilt keep them there. Something that supports this is how the play is performed. The characters do not tell their story one by one, but garbled together, one saying a few lines before being switched to another character. It is jumbled with no linear line of thought or speech. And the fact that Beckett requests that the play repeat itself makes me think of ghosts haunting the same halls over and over again, reenacting their death or a normal day in the life. It gives the feel that these three characters will tell their story over and over again, not listening to one another, and just spending the rest of eternity in those urns.

 

I also noticed how Beckett leaves how the characters die ambiguous, but gives us clues of their demise. M, throughout the play, would hiccough as would a man who had too much to drink. I see him as dying from either alcohol poisoning or perhaps from liver disease. He could have also possibly died from an accident in which he was drunk at the time. W1 had shown signs of being suicidal throughout the production, so it is not at all difficult to imagine how she died. The only thing the play does not indicate is the manner of which she would have killed herself. Women usually do not shot themselves in the heads for vanity reasons, so if I had to hazard a guess it would be either pills or slit wrists. As for the mistress, as the play worn on, she showed signs of instability, laughing crazed and talking more nonsense than the other two. I would imagine that she could have died in a mental institution, that she went crazy after M left her, like he left his first wife, and died alone.

The Drowsy Chaperone

It took me a while to understand this prompt for this blog post, but I think I got it now so here goes.

The difference between choices for the play-within-the-play Drowsy Chaperone and the real Drowsy Chaperone is that the playwrights chose to add another play in the mix, abet "accidentally". In the musical The Man is listening to, never has a break that includes a very racist song. While that could be considered just a part of the story, but the playwrights chose to include this part and not as a part of the fictional musical. They could have made a number within the fictional show that was made from the same cloth, but it was only added to the meta-show part.

A second element that is different between the two plays is the motif. A motif in the play-within-the-play would obviously be monkey, but it is different in meta-narrative play. While it still has a monkey in it, it is not really shown in the outside world of the fictional play other than the note from The Man about it. A motif that applies to the whole play would be interruptions. There are many interruptions in both the fictional The Drowsy Chaperone and the narrative world of it. A good deal of them are caused by The Man himself, but some are caused by outside sources: the telephone, the scratching of the record player, the maid having put the wrong record in the wrong sleeve. It all leads up to the final interruption of the power going out. Even the final moment of the show, where The Man is ascended into the rafters, he has to pause his assent to grab the record.

On the Verge Glossary

Found this on blogger, a glossary on all of the terms in On the Verge. Hope this helps you out!

On the Verge Glossary

Three Viewings

Okay, I seriously doubt no one else will see this common point, but Margaret-Mary Welsh. Not only is the name fun to say (Margaret-Mary, Margaret-Mary, Margaret-Mary) and the fact that I want to switch it around (Mary-Margaret just makes more sense,) but she seems to be an expression of comfort, however small, to all of the three characters. And while the interaction with her is not major, she is there, in the peripheral of the story, like an angel that is always there and watching.

As far as a motif, I think it is deep, personal loss. Yes, they are all set at a funeral home, and they all go to funerals, but the funerals that are most prominent are not the ones that the three characters felt the most at. Ellis, being a mortician, speaks of many funerals, some in great detail. But the funeral of Tessie is only described briefly. He speaks of his love for her throughout the play, sometimes just standing there and saying "I love you" over and over again. With Mac, she would go to funerals to steal jewelry off of the dead one's body, but she couldn't go to the one funeral that mattered, the loss of her family. And with Virginia, her husband's funeral was perhaps the most detailed of the three when it came to the lost loves, but the events that happened afterwards overshadowed. She not only had to deal with the loss of her husband, she had to deal with the possible loss of who she thought her husband was, and even though it had worked out in the end, it was still painful to see (or read) her go through that.

Another motif I just realized is that they all take away something from this, whether it is physical or metaphorical. Ellis took Tessie's pacemaker, which kept her heart going until the accident. Mac took Nettie's ring, though she throws it in the hole later, and Virginia took on the responsibilities of her husband, but was later given 13 written things of his love.

On the Verge

The image that first popped into my head was three silhouetted women in the classic style of Victorian, but with pith helmets on their heads. The three women would be of three different shades, and one of the women would have another woman climbing down from the pith helmets, much like a mountain climber would descent from Mt. Rushmore, having her scale down the face of one of the women. I chose the tag line, "Where life as we know it is, well, not as we know it." (p. 234) It is the second spoken line in Act Two, and I thought it was a perfect example for this play. That quote reminds me of Star Trek: The Original Series ("It's life, Jim, but not as we know it." Dr. McCoy, "Devil in the Dark"), which is science fiction, much like this play. They are not just exploring a world that no one else has traveled, they are exploring a different time. They are moving both slowly and quickly into the future and everything that they knew in their lifetime, from what are eggbeaters to who the President is, changes so quickly that literally life is not how they knew it. I chose the image because I still wanted the three women, but not holding the umbrellas or eggbeaters. I wanted them faded as to show the distance they have at the end, where Fanny stays with Nicky, Alex goes off with Troll, and Mary, the clearest of the them all, continues on with her journey to the future. The person scaling one of the women's face is not only from actual events in the play but it shows a descent their high intelligent language to their drop down to the rest of humanity. As the play went on, the less times I had to consult a dictionary for terms, and I wanted to reflect that.

I'm a creative person, and I couldn't help myself. Here is an actual image of what I was talking about.

Fires in the Mirror

While I understand the confusion of the beginning parts of Anna Deavere Smith's play Fires in the Mirror, that it is such a long part of the play before the actual topic of the play is performed and it does not appear that there is a credible reason why to perform those parts of the play. But I assure you, those parts are just as important to this play as the last half and should not be removed, nor should the order of the play be changed at all. The first, and quite obvious reason that I will not dwell on it long, is that that was the playwright's choice. I am a firm believer of trying to keep words of the play to the exact way the playwright first presented it. But that is my own personal opinion and should not be the sole basis in which you form your judgment.
But another reason that you should keep the beginning is because while it may not appear on the surface, or at least the first time you read it, that it plays any significance to the later part of the play, but it does. Every story needs some background, novels do it, and we do it in theatre all the time. It is called the exposition, Gustav Freytag uses it in his graph to help introduce important information to the audience. And while stories of how Al Sharpton got his hair style or why the orthodox Jew couldn't turn off a radio might not appear important in the grand schemes of things, for this play it is important for people to understand the two cultures that are at play here. It is essential to the plot of the story that a clear background is given as to understand the different versions of the start of the riots. Otherwise, it would just be a story of "he said, she said," and no one would understand why the events happened like they did. They would get the story, but only part of it. so by Smith giving the background information about these two very distinct groups of people, it allows the true story of what went on that August than by just layout out the supposed facts of the case.

Show and Tell Post 2: M. Butterfly

For my second Show and Tell post I chose M. Butterfly, which I read in my theatre history class. M. Butterfly was written by David Henry Hwang. It was first premiered at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre on Broadway on the 20^th of March in 1988. It was directed by John Dexter with John Lithgow and DB Wong playing the two main characters at the start of the seven hundred and seventy-seven performances run.  This play is inspired by both the opera Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini and the loosely based on true story of the French diplomat, Bernard Boursicot, who had a relationship with a Chinese spy, Shi Pei Pu, who masqueraded as a female opera singer.

M. Butterfly starts off with Rene Gallimard, the French Diplomat, in his prison cell, talking about how he was in love with the “Perfect Woman.” He talks about how he is now famous and how boring his life was before we started working at the French embassy in China. That was when he met and fell in love with Song Lilling, an opera singer who was performing a piece from his favorite opera, Madame Butterfly. Song Lilling is able to entrap Gallimard and they start to have an affair with gives Gallimard the adventure and power he craves while Song is able to get information from Gallimard that the Chinese government wants. But after several years, Gallimard is sent back to France, and Song Lilling is forced to follow him because her government will not pay for her to stay. The couple are together for twenty years before it is found out that not only is Song Lilling a Chinese spy, but she was actually a male. Song Lilling is able to completely fool Gallimard all those years that Gallimard is unable to comprehend the truth and decides to keep the fantasy of the perfect woman alive in his head, ending his life in a Japanese suicide ritual.

One of the dramaturgical choices Hwang had made was how closely he tied the plot of this play to Madame Butterfly. The opera is not just a play that the characters in the piece performs or likes, there is both an overt and a subtle connection between the two productions. The more overt one would be that Song Lilling emulated Madame Butterfly to gain the trust and affection of Gallimard to gain the information his government needed. He allowed Gallimard to play the part of Pinkerton and allow him to feel the power that the character in the opera had over his Butterfly. But the subtlety of it is that, in truth, Gallimard is Madame Butterfly, that he allows his love for the ‘Perfect Woman’ to trap him in a lie for all those years. Gallimard is the poor wife stuck while her husband abandons her. It is Gallimard stuck in the prison while Song Lilling goes free. The end proves this by showing Gallimard dying the same way Madame Butterfly did in the opera.

Another choice I found interesting was how Hwang never really spelled it out in the play that Song Lilling was really a man, but had left a lot of clues. The first clue, was of course, was the playwright’s notes, which states that this play was loosely based on the events between the French Diplomat and the male Chinese opera singer/spy. Though, I am unsure if that was just a part of my textbook or if it was shown to the audience via the play program. But other clues are that Song never allowed Gallimard to never see him naked and that Comrade Chin kept on talking about dishonor and lack of understanding for homosexuals and the fact that he only brought the same upon himself. It wasn’t until the end of the second act and the beginning of the third that the audience is told what has been only hinted before, that the woman Gallimard has been in love with has been a man this whole time.

 

Source: www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=4497

Comment Post index

http://2130coryvincent.blogspot.com/2013/04/noise-about-noises-off.html?showComment=1365872824665#c3999352780904772545

http://garrettstheater.blogspot.com/2013/04/detroit.html?showComment=1365873127152#c2174424565998567336

http://emilielegethtr2130blog.blogspot.com/2013/04/buried-child.html?showComment=1365873745126#c3501847290314818474

http://thtr2130sh.blogspot.com/2013/04/glass-of-water.html?showComment=1365873346724#c2145843935191635840

http://garrettstheater.blogspot.com/2013/04/water-by-spoonful.html?showComment=1365874305740#c5640078511550907837

http://emilielegethtr2130blog.blogspot.com/2013/04/water-by-spoonful-hudges.html?showComment=1365874600150#c5530464115214477529

 

Noises Off

I think great motif for Michael Frayn's Noises Off would be the old adage of Murphy's Law, "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." In this farce, we see what is supposed to be a normal production start spiraling out of control, from something as minor as Brooke losing her contact to the multiple love triangles that end up completely unending a performance. Almost at every turn, something that should just happen naturally and melodically turns into a complete disaster. And while it's a given that all productions would have some sort of mess up or accident (such as I once stepped on a fellow actor's prop glasses after having problems with my own contacts right before the lights went up), this one shows Murphy's Law to the extreme. Frayn has the actors miss lines, skip queues, have wardrobe malfunctions, and completely allow their personal problems to bleed out into the production that ends with them having to drag the curtain down.

I think a great tag line would be the line Lloyd says in the first act. “That’s farce. That’s the theatre. That’s life!” Not only because the play itself is a farce, but it this play shows what can go wrong in a production, and that the key is that this is life, and with life, you just have to go on. That things will go crazy and chaotic, and you just have to accept it and move on. Just because they are putting up a production, doesn’t mean life has stopped. The actors can try to put aside their emotions and their problems, but they are but human, and can only go so far. And though they allowed their personal problems to bleed into their performance, none of them actually stopped trying to put it on. And that what being in theatre involves, to keep on going even though you messed up.

 

Detroit

In this play, I think a great phrase to describe it is "Detroit is not a city, it's a lifestyle". There is a news article I read online that is entitled "Letters: Life in Detroit--distressed but not beyond hope." It talks about how "this once great city" is dying, that it is a "shell" of it's former glory. The neighborhoods are decrepit and broken down, the once sparkly houses turned to seed. And the city will not or cannot help. This mimics not only the neighborhood that the two couples live in, but the couples themselves, or at least each individual character. Frank, at the end of the play, talks about the former glory of the neighborhood, how everyone knew everyone, and how the houses are falling apart. And even with the "fancified" houses, that he could understand why those in the crumbling houses would be wary of asking for help from the richer people. The neighborhood itself is a Detroit neighborhood, even if it wasn't really in Detroit. And as far as the characters are concerned, it is about the human condition, to be downtrodden but still with hope. It is almost like the characters are Detroit, that they were once good and great, but have been neglected by those around them and are falling into decay, especially Kenny/Roger. His mother moved away, not wanting to be apart of the family, and he got into trouble but it seems no one wanted to help him. So he kept on getting into more and more trouble. But it finally appears that he wanted to try to make a new life. Get a new name, a new place to live, and someone who he can share his new life with. And with Mary and Ben, they were lonely and forgotten, in their little house, when Shannon and Kenny came by and opened their world for them. And while that friendship turned disastrous, the ending was not all that bad. They may have lost their house, but it opened doors for the couple that they probably would not have thought of before. They plan to go to England and start their new life. They are distress...but not beyond hope.

http://www.freep.com/article/20120527/OPINION04/205270482/Letters-Life-in-Detroit-distressed-but-not-beyond-hope

Water by the Spoonful

The scene I think is a pivotal moment in the play that has the realities interacting is the scene where Elliot and Yaz find Odessa's computer and starts talking to Orangutan on the computer. Prior to that, the only time the real life is interactive and not just glimpse of the real world and online world is when Odessa makes it. This time it is two worlds interacting without the middle person. When Elliot and Yaz comes into his biological mother's apartment to grab things to pawn off to get her sister some flowers for her funeral, they come across Odessa's website and Elliot, who is pissed off with his mother, tries to start things on her website, but when Orangutan outs his own addiction to pain medication. Obviously upset and angry, Elliot takes his anger out at Orangutan and then unplugs his mother's computer to sell it. When Yaz tries to get answers from him, having not know of his addiction, but Elliot deflects and pleads with her to let it go, which she does.

In this scene and the scene before, we saw the contempt Elliot had with his mother and people who are addicted in general, so to finally have the information out that he himself is an addict is jarring but somehow understandable. Elliot is in clear denial of his own problems and chooses instead to manifest his feelings of his own addiction upon his mother, who had hurt him in the past with her own addiction. He can't face what he has become so he tries to push off his guilt and turns it into anger at his mother. He hates what his mother's addiction did to her and his family, especially his sister. To have Elliot be confronted about his own addiction by another recovering addict while the realities intersect creates a stronger tie between the two worlds.

Buried Child

In Buried Child by Sam Sheppard, there are some realism aspects of this play, but it does not follow the traditional path of realism. There are some aspects that does not match the criteria, such as the lack of dramatic irony. The audience finds out the secrets when the other characters find out the secrets. Such as the secret of the dead baby. It is hinted, which shows some form of ambiguity (more on that a little later), but we do not know the real truth until the very end when Tilden comes from the back yard (or what we assume is the back yard) cradling a skeletal baby in his arms. The facts of this play that comes out is something that a reader or a watcher has to read/see a second time to capture all of the information that is not clearly thrown out there. The irony is hard to see because there is no clear distinction between reality and appearance. As I said before, everything that we do find out is found at the end, and still we don't know everything when it comes to the secrets or mysteries of this play.

A lot of things are left to ambiguity, such as what happened in New Mexico with Tilden, who was really the father of the dead baby(though it is implied that Tilden was the father), who really was Vince, just to name a few. There is some ambiguity that is revealed at the end, such as if there really was a buried child (there was.)

A bit of complexity would be Vince. It isn't until the end that he is remembered by his grandmother, but through out the play we (the audience) wonder if he was just as crazy as the rest of them appeared to be. Another complexity would be Bradley, who appeared all big and bad when he intimidates Shelly, but becomes a weak and pathetic child when his leg is taken away.

This play is most certainly not black-and-white. There are still some things left unknown by the end of the play and while it gives the appearance of ending almost exactly where it starts, there is no true closure except for the existence of the buried child.

Glass of Water

If I had to pick just one person for the protagonist for Glass of Water, (or, at least, I can't think of a reason why it is not useful for the script) I would have to choose Abigail Churchill. With Abigail, we hear of her struggles before we even see her, with Arthur Masham explaining to the Viscount Bolingbroke (Henry St. John) that he was in love with a woman who just lost her job and that he cannot marry her though they are in love due to the person that is sponsoring him. Abigail's struggles continue when we find out that the job posting she came to the palace to apply for has already been filled. But a hopeful situation occurred when a then unknown lady came in whom  Abigail had been kind to before offers her a job. That lady turns out to be Queen Anne, but the news becomes bad quickly for her. The Duchess of Marlborough has the ear of the Queen and also happens to be Abigail's cousin and does not like the scandal of having someone as poor as Abigail relative to her. While Abigail's occupation goes back and forth, she finds out her love, Masham, has killed a man and must go on the run, but before he can leave, he is given a higher station that forces him to stay, all thanks to his secret "sponsor." That sponsor turns out to be the Duchess, and she is in love with Masham. But that is not the only one, the Queen is also in love with him and Abigail tries to stop both of them getting her man. She also has to deal with her friend, the Viscount, getting threaten by (who else) the Duchess. Abigail deals with a lot of struggle in such a short amount of time and it makes it easy to want to root for her. In the end, though, her struggles prove worthwhile when she gets the approval of the Queen to marry her love and that her love does not go to jail for killing a man. Of all the characters in the play, it almost appears she has the most "screen time" and while the some of the characters also suffer from some difficulties, hers seems to be the more pronounced.

Out of Gas on Lover's Leap

The play I chose for “Show and Tell” is a two person play I did for my directing class at Southeastern Louisiana University, Out of Gas on Lover’s Leap. Out of Gas was written by Mark St. Germain and was written around 1985. The first production was at the WPA Theatre in New York staring Melissa Leo and Fisher Stevens and directed by Elinor Renfield (St. Germain). To my knowledge, there is no actively running production of this play, but you can purchase the script from Amazon.

Out of Gas is the story of two lost souls in the form of rich, bratty teenagers. Mystery “Myst” Angeleeds is the daughter of a washed up pop singer who follows in the footsteps of her mother’s promiscuous ways and Chauncey “Grouper” Morris is the son of a U.S. senator, slightly geeky and is an outsider at school because of it. The play starts with them on the hood of Grouper’s car after their high school graduation from a rich boarding school for trouble teens. They are drinking and smoking pot as the give details of their plans for the future. But as they plan for the future, the past starts biting them in the butt, such as Grouper’s suicide attempt and both of their parent’s ignore them, thus causing them to act out in hopes to garner their attention. They eventually make love while being stuck up there, but the bliss is short lasting as Myst reveals she’s pregnant with another man’s child and plans to get rid of it. They both try to plan a future for themselves in vain, but they feel their sorrows are too deep and they end up jumping off the cliff holding hands.

One of the choices the playwright makes that I find interesting is the fact that these are two obviously spoiled rich kids; we shouldn’t be feeling sorry for them. They have money, a great education, and a bright future ahead of them, but what the playwright does shows that just because someone’s lives a privileged life, it does not mean everything will work out fine. Both children may have all the money they would want and need, and are provided well when it comes to material needs, they are severely deprived of parental affection. When Grouper tries to commit suicide by hanging himself on a basketball hoop, his father doesn’t come to check on him. Myst acts more like a grown up than her own mother, who when she’s in company of her daughter and others, she just treats her like a sister. Myst is so starved for her mother’s attention (as her mother) that she self-mutilated herself as a child, and despite the surgeries and pain she had, she claims it was the best time of her life. Myst and Grouper both hate their parents and try to emulate them, and it’s so disheartening to see their lives so destroyed by the very people who brought them into the world.

Another choice I found compelling and I predicted it when I first read it, was the motif of Myst’s condition. From the beginning, she complained about not feeling good, and would sometimes refuse alcohol and drugs from Grouper had my alarm bells going “She’s Pregnant!!!” Several times during the play she would start on the topic of kids and would be nervous about Grouper’s response.  When she finally reveals her pregnancy, she says she plans on getting an abortion, and that is the true reason why her mother was coming down and takes her to France, so they could get the pregnancy terminated.

Hornby's Progression

The motif, or progression, in How I Learned to Drive is actually stated in the title: driving. In this play, we see the transition of Li'l Bit learning to drive (though not in chronological order) and how she slowly learns to take control of herself in an atmosphere that is not healthy. Her uncle molests her while the adults in her family look the other way, and her peers see her only as a sexual object as opposed to the intelligent young woman she is.  Through out the play, we see certain points in her life that foreshadow what happens in the second to last scene of the play, such as the first scene when the audience realizes that the man Li'l Bit is with in the car is actually her uncle, and we realize this can't be the first time this has happened. Progressively, more and more details emerge about the incestuous relationship until we get to the final foreshadow of Li'l Bit's mother verbally warning her daughter away from Uncle Peck but does nothing physically to stop what is about to happen, which is Peck molesting Li'l Bit for the first time when she was eleven during their first driving lesson.

In the TV crime drama, NCIS, at the very end of the first season showed a very particular motif that ended up foreshadowing the season finale of their second season. In the last episode of season one, the main character, Special Agent Leroy Jethro Gibbs, in a dream, walks into the Navy Yard's morgue and opens a body bag with one of his agents, Special Agent Kate Todd, dead with a bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. At the end of that episode, it's a different person, an enemy woman, who is discovered with the same bullet whole. But the premonition of death continues on subtly through out the second season until the last two episodes. In the second to last episode, one of the agents, Tony DiNozzo, comes in contact with the plague (via postal biological warfare) and nearly dies. In the last episode shows the still ill but recovering Agent DiNozzo, Agent Todd, and Agent Tim McGee almost get blown up by an Hamas agent the team has been trying to track since season one. Abby Sciuto, their forensic specialist, worries about the safety of her friends and tells Agent Todd to watch out for Tony because she had had a dream about his face covered in blood. Finally, at the conclusion of the episode, after stopping a missile hitting a dock filled with families awaiting their soldier's return, Agent Todd is hit by a sniper in the middle of her forehead and is killed. Agent DiNozzo, who was standing behind her, is then shown with Kate's blood on his face. I do believe the motif in a fully realized production is different than one that is written in a script because there is the factor of did the audience catch that reference? It may be not that different in a short thirty minute or hour long TV show compared to a script because if the motif happens only in that one episode, then it's easier to remember the details of the motif as opposed to having the progression last several episodes or, in NCIS's case, a whole season.

Overtones

Alice Gerstenberg's Overtones is an understandably confusing play if one was just observing it without the script to follow along. Even with it, it's hard to completely understand this play. Who sees who, who hears what, and how they do it can baffle the mind a bit. But hopefully I believe I understand the rules of this world. The rules are that the primitive selves are able to see, hear, and possibly touch their cultured selves, or otherwise their “trained” selves, while the cultured selves can only respond to their primitive selves. In all of the scenes, none of the trained selves ever initiated contact with their other selves.  In the first part of the play, where it’s just Harriet and Hetty, Hetty was able to start the conversation with Harriet while looking at her and even intimidating her, while Harriet is unable to see her primitive self. She is only able to speak to her. Also, the trained selves cannot hear or see another person’s primitive self. Harriet is not able to hear Maggie, nor is Margaret able to hear Hetty. The primitive self hears the other’s cultured self, but does not respond to directly to them, but directs their attention to the other’s primitive self. Primitive selves are able to hear other trained selves, only able to directly respond to other primitive selves and their own trained selves. Primitive selves, like Hetty and Maggie, are able to, according to the play, are able to not only see and hear, but they are actually able to touch each other. They can hold a terse conversation with each other without their trained selves, which is apparent in the text and they get into a physical altercation at the close of the play. I think that hopefully that audience will see this in the way all of the characters interact (or not interact) with each other.  

As for as if there are any rules broken, going by the assumption that what the playwright wrote is law, and was done on purpose, no rules could have been broken. Gerstenberg, whether intentionally or accidentally, allowed the primitive selves to communicate freely among themselves and to physical attack each other, then that is now permanently a part of the play and is a part of the world that play exists in.

Trifles

In regards of producing Trifles as a theatricalized play as opposed to it's original setting in naturalistic, I would like to argue both sides.


For: The idea of a very minimalist design for Trifles is very interesting. Having both read and watched the play, and having read the short story that was based on this play, I feel like I at least a better than average insight to what this play is about. To make this production minimalistic and abstract, would put the play in a different perspective, such as from the men's point of view. I would like to refer this to "gender blindness" where a man can walk into a "woman's domain" (such as a kitchen) and see nothing but "kitchen things." To the men in the play, I wouldn't doubt that they just see the room in shapes as opposed to the detailed objects they are. I think that making the audience see the room from the men's point of view would create a very surreal effect and will probably confuse the audience in a good way. It would probably make them try to envision what the room would look like in natural form (in another words, it would make the audience think.)


Against: There is a reason why this play was titled Trifles. It is almost esential that we see all of Minnie Wright's world, her uncleaned kitchen, her broken jars of fruit, her unfinished quilt, and the pretty little box that held her dearest friend. To see the world through a woman's eye and see that the room is not just a pile of dirty pots and unkept home, but that we find the reason why these things are the way they are by following each and every clue in that kitchen full of "women's trifles."

How I Learned to Drive

With Forne's How I Learned to Drive, I think the choice to use a Greek Chorus was definitely more than just a convenence of low casting. From what I got out of just reading it, I can see why Forne chose to have those three Greek Choruses playing different roles rather than each individual character be casted. One, it helped keep the focus on Lil' Bit and Peck and not on the numerous other characters. Two, to Lil' Bit and Peck, in the situation they were in, it probably felt like all the other characters were just one set of voices anyway. They are hiding this shameful secret and they are fearful that others will find out and it alienates them from others. So all the faces mesh together, an Us vs Them mentality. I personally think Forne did that beautifully by limiting the number of actors on stage.

A dramatical choice that I've never been a fan of is when the actor talks to the audience. Forne has a lot of that happening in this production, and sometimes the actor will stop in the middle of dialogue with another character to address the audience. As a spectator, I don't like being removed from the play by the actor.  But the difference in this production is that it feels like both an instructional video and a home video with commentary added to it. With the subject matter, I can understand why Forne would strive to distance the audience from the happenings in the play.

The Conduct of Life

The dramaturgical style of Maria Irene Fornes's The Conduct of Life is very unique, and very disconcerting. While some of the context in the play I found disturbing (and I'm sure it was meant to), I was more put-off by the abrupt ending of some of her scenes. But that is the style Fornes' chose and it does create more tension and captures the audience's attention by leaving them wanting more.

But another dramaturgical style I've noticed in this play was the way that sometimes it felt like the characters thought the audience was a part of the play and "break the fourth wall." But unlike other plays I've seen or read, where a character would act like they were saying their thoughts aloud, it truly felt like sometimes that the audience was a single character in which some of the other characters talk to. In the opening monologue, Orlando talks about how his need of a promotion and his sexual drive as if he were trying to convince someone (the audience) that he is in control. I think it causes the audience to be even more involved in the production.

As far as why it was named The Conduct of Life, my guess would be that it has something to do with the way we behave in life. About how our life choices effects not only us, but those around us.

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